Texas barely resembles the state it once was. Under Bush, it became a sleazy auction where would-be Bushes sell out the rule of law and the people. Columnist Joseph Galloway asks: "Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government?" I have a simple explanation. The GOP looks and acts like a criminal conspiracy because it is one. It looks like a crime syndicate because it's cheaper to buy a politician than it is to obey the law. They proved it all in Texas.Surely, there is probable cause in the public record to justify a Federal Grand Jury investigation of Bush's inner circle. Galloway goes on to ask:
What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world?Joe, listen up! I am fourth generation, native Texan. I can tell you --Bush was always a crook. He didn't "go over to The Dark Side"! He never left it! He did leave Texas in ruins --dead last in education, polluted, divided. Bush is not a horseman in the Texas sense of the word. He is, rather, one of four horsemen of a GOP apocalypse. The others are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice.
Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot?Bush is not Texan. He's a carpetbagger born in Connecticut who left the state of Texas much worse than he found it. Already the state of the state had not been good thanks to Texas' recent flirtation with Republicanism, corporatism, fascism. I am a Native Texan. I recall another Texas. A better Texas. A Texas not yet sold out to privilege with the Oil Depletion Allowance. While I still lived there, government at all levels outsourced almost everything to "private enterprise", most notoriously the prisons. Convicts are a source of cheap if not slave labor. It is an Orwellian nightmare of no accountability, waste, graft, and fascism.
What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?
Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?
What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list?
Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?--Joseph Galloway, What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?
While Governor, Bush presided over significant declines in Texas' education standards. Most notorious was the so-called "Houston Miracle", the brain child of then Governor Bush’s secretary of education, Rod Paige. Briefly, it was all a fraud.Suicide Exposes Squalor in Texas Prison
Suicide Shows Squalid Conditions in Privately-Run Texas Prison; Company Operates in 15 States
By JOHN MILLER
After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.
"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."
Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.
It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector....
When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.Texas still ranks dead last in education. But it was not only in education that Bush failed Texas. Bush left behind an environmental waste land. Under George W. Bush's "leadership", Texas went from dead last in education to "number one polluter" in many categories.
There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.
In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.--Rod Paige’s Houston ‘Miracle’, The Carpetbagger Report
- 1 in the Emission of Ozone Causing Air Pollution Chemicals
- 1 in Toxic Chemical releases into the Air
- 1 in use of Deep Well Injectors as method of Waste Disposal
- 1 in counties listed in top 20 of Emitting Cancer Causing Chemicals
- 1 in Total Number of Hazardous Waste Incinerators
- 1 in Environmental Justice Title 6 complaints
- 1 in production of Cancer causing Benzene & Vinyl Chloride
- 1 Largest Sludge Dump in Country [See: Toxic Texas referenced below]
It is no coincidence that the state's biggest polluters are also Bush's biggest contributors. The following list is what the word "fascism" is all about.
Apache Corporation $1,000
ARCO $13,250
Assn. of Electric Companies of TX $1,500
BP Amoco $5,000
Central and Southwest Corp/ American Electric Power Co $18,500
Champion International Corp $5,250
Coastal Corp $37,250
Crown Central Petroleum Corp $6,000
Dow Chemical Company $26,000
Duke Capital Corp $23,000
Eastman Chemical Company $7,200
El Paso Energy Corporation $6,000
Enron Corp $30,000
Entergy Gulf States $9,500
Exxon $24,200
Fulbright & Jaworski $67,000
International Paper $5,000
Hired Gun Lobbyists for Grandfathered Firms $150,500
Koch Industries $4,500
Lockheed $17,400
Lyondell Petrochemical GP Inc. $3,500
MND Energy Corporation $2,250
Mobil Oil $250
New Century Energies $2,000
Oryx Energy Company $3,000
PG & E $5,000
Phillips/GPM $11,998
Rohm & Haas $2,000
Southwestern Electric Service Co. $6,250
Tenneco, Inc. $1,000
Texaco Inc $20,000
Texas Utilities $64,800
Torch Energy Marketing $2,400
TX Assn. of Business & Commerce PAC $20,000
TX Cattle Feeders Assn./BEEF PAC $20,000
TX Cotton Ginners Assn. PAC $500
TX Mid-Continent Oil & Gas $18,000
Ultramar Diamond Shamrock $5,000
Union Carbide $3,500
Union Pacific Resources $11,000
Valero Refining $30,000
TOTAL $692,498
Why do corporate polluters buy politicians like Bush? It's cheaper to pony up for crooks than it is to respect the law and the environment. I've often wondered how big corporations could make a credible moral distinction between paying off the mob and paying off the GOP, a Bush, a Harding, a DeLay!
In Texas, it is all systemized. It's the way things are done. Election laws in the "Lone Star" state allow unlimited personal or political action committee contributions to elected officials. It's a licence to buy yourself a politician. Every fascist fat cat has one or several. As braggin' rights, it beats a four car garage, a membership at the River Oaks Country Club, or the Enclave. Best of all, it's a hedge against having to act responsibly. It's license to act like an asshole.
Corporations get away with it because they claim the right of free speech. It's called "corporate personhood" i.e., corporations have the same rights as do individuals. Clearly, however, corporations do not have the same responsibilities. I submit to this forum that if corporations have the same rights as people, then, when corporations break the laws, then the President, the Chairman of the board, the entire board of directors and every large stockholder should be rounded up and brought to trial. They are, after all, "persons" in the eyes of the law. Do the crime. Do the time!
Deny personhood to "legal abstractions"! The idea that corporations, mere legal abstractions, are to be treated in the eyes of the law as persons possessing First Amendment rights including free speech is absurd. Begin a citizen's movement now to support a Constitutional Amendment spelling out clearly that corporations are not people and are, therefore, subject to any law that "we the people" care to legislate in order to keep out environments clean, our governments free of crooks and liars, our schools excellent, our neighborhoods free of poisons, our lives free of war crimes and the megalomaniacal ambitions of fascist admirers of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.Goebbels Would be Proud.
How did it get like this? How does it continue? Yes, corporations are running the show and that guarantees fascism; that’s how fascism happens. Yes, the leaders are all in hock to the money men. You can’t get elected if you don’t have the money. Yes, the people aren’t as bright as they once were and that isn’t saying much. Yes, the glitter of bright shiny plastic and the star power veneer of bimbo and bozo celebrity as well as the gangsta soundtrack make what should embarrass a borderline intellect look hot, but, what’s the real problem? ...
Source: Public Research Works.
"Old mother Texas, what did she give to me? Not a goddamn thing" --Jett Rink, GiantThe character Jett Rink, portrayed by James Dean, was patterned after Houston oil tycoon Glenn Herbert McCarthy who died in 1988. Novelist Edna Ferber met McCarthy at the landmark Shamrock Hotel in Houston. The fictional Emperador Hotel was inspired by the Shamrock Hotel which is no longer standing, a victim of "progress" and even worse architecture. It stood just across the street from the famous Texas Medical Center.The Sleeping Giant Awakes
The People have spoken END THE WAR! NOW!The People have Spoken. SAVE THE PLANET! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP TORTURE! NOW!
The People have spoken. CREATE UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE! NOW!
The People have spoken. REIN IN THE CORPORATIONS! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP GIVING AWAY AMERICAN JOBS! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP THE REPUBLICAN CRIME FAMILY! NOW!
The People have spoken. FOLLOW THE CONSTITUTION! NOW!
The People have spoken. FIX NEW ORLEANS! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP SPENDING TRILLIONS ON ARMS! FIX THINGS HERE! NOW!
The People have spoken. ENFORCE THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP THE DRUG WAR! NOW!
The People have spoken. STOP THE PRIVATIZATION OF OUR GOVERNMENT! NOW!
The People have spoken. CEASE AND DESIST THE POLICE STATE!!! NOW!!!!
The People have spoken. ELECTION CAMPAIGN REFORM! NOW!
The People have Spoken. END POVERTY! NOW!
The People have spoken. IMPEACH BUSH AND CHENEY! NOW!
Additional Resources:
- It is time to rethink the notion of free speech for corporations
- Corporations Are Not People
- Polluters Bet Big On Bush On The Campaign Money Trail
- Toxic Texas: The Environmental Legacy of Governor George W. Bush
- 60 Minutes: The 'Texas Miracle'
- Houston Miracle: all children left behind?
- Texas is dead last
- Big Bend: Air Pollution Threatens
Texas' Majestic Landscape - America: The Uneducated
The Existentialist Cowboy
Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Bush
Spread the word:
13 comments:
"Loudly and Frankly - Geez Us - We're Calling"
www.ilovepoetry.com/viewpoem.asp?id=92761
My new favorite hymn.
Is it your favorite too?
You would think that the courts would have twigged to the fact that corporations are not people the first time one of them committed an offense that called for jail time. The absurdity of trying to put a brick building, a stock issue, or an organizational chart behind bars points out just how ludicrous this most harmful of legal fictions is.
Indeed, sad! This situation stems from a single supreme court decision that escapes me at the moment. I will search out the case law and put up an article about it. Striking down this principle alone will go a long way toward destroying, perhaps forever, the CHOKE HOLD corporations have on American life and culture.
This article is linked to from other sources including Buzzflash.net ...where I found the following interesting comments:
I am especially grieved by the story linked at the end of this piece:
http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/big_bend.html
It lays out the terrible pollution of the Big Bend area of Texas. I spent time in Big Bend National Park at the beginning of the 70s. Back then you were told that you could see how clean the air was by the huge quantities of lichens growing on rocks and other things. Some of those rock expanses looked like they had been splashed with many bright colors of paint. I suppose I would not know the place now. The element of pollution to which the lichens are sensitive? Sulfur compounds and atmospheric acidity. --written by kladner
When any business owner creates a system where the employees can steal from him, it is really HIS fault for opening the door to the crime. I think it is the same with our government we have allowed oversight to wither, the GAO has NO teeth and crimes uncovered have little penalty. So, at the end of the day it's on us to correct the system. Unfortunately we have to go through the corrupt 'employees' to do it. --written by JohnFreeman
Bush is not Texan. He's a carpetbagger born in Connecticut who left the state of Texas much worse than he found it.
Let me extend an appology for the sad state of Connecticut, not only for the Bush Family but for Joe as well, Sorry All.--written by CwV
FuzzFlash sez...
Sad and Len, here'e a smidge from Professor Wiki re corporations:
"Legal Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia Joel Bakan describes the modern corporate entity as 'an institutional psychopath' and a 'psychopathic creature.' Bakan claims that corporations, when considered as natural living persons, exhibit the traits of antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy.
Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and activist, describes the corporate structure as being fascist:
A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward.... I'd love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it's the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants.
Chomsky has also criticized the legal decisions that led to the creation of the modern corporation:
Corporations, which previously had been considered artificial entities with no rights, were accorded all the rights of persons, and far more, since they are "immortal persons", and "persons" of extraordinary wealth and power. Furthermore, they were no longer bound to the specific purposes designated by State charter, but could act as they choose, with few constraints.
The concept of the corporation and its role in modern society was heavily criticized in the documentary film The Corporation.
"The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks, a corporate governance advisor in the film and former GOP candidate for Senate from Maine."
-----------------------------------
Meanwhile, just over the border, the systematic, toxic rape of Mother Earth continues unabated.
SUNSET ON LOUISIANNE by ZACHARY RICHARD from the album SNAKE BITE LOVE (1992)
"When I was young and full of dreams,
My whole life in front of me.
But things are not always the way they seem,
Some things will always change.
My papa’d been a trapper living hand to mouth,
But when I made shop foreman, I had it all figured out,
I thanked god each and everyday
When the industry came to town.
Chorus:
Sunset on Louisianne,
The sun going down on the promised land*,
I’ve given you everything I can,
I’ve got nothing left to lose.
Married a girl from Pauché Briide,
Raised a family of Cajun kids,
Nobody did no better than we did,
But things can always change.
My sister lost her baby premature,
And my papa got the sickness that got no cure,
And what they told us about it at the plant,
We could not be sure.
Chorus
Bridge:
Smokestacks burning on the river,
From New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
How can I go on believing
When they won’t tell me the truth.
I take my grand son fishing down at Camanida Bay,
I hope some of this beauty will last,
But, lord, it’s changing so damn fast,
Each and every day.
I love the river and I love the swamp,
The snowy egret and the old bull frog,
But they’re harder to find one and all
Since the industry came to town."
* Arcadia/Arcadian hence, Cajun.
Thanks Fuzzflash,
Louisiana, as we know, has likewise been screwed by the goddamned beast!
I see some light at the end of this long tunnel. Let's all just hang on.
fyi
What's amazing, Len, is not the bribery but how cheap these guys are. Lukery made the same observation when looking at the bribes paid in the Sibel Edmonds case - $5000 would buy you a Congress Critter. Haliburton, Blackwater and Unocal made the real money. But cheap! - may be we could pay a few to start an impeachment.
damien said...
What's amazing, Len, is not the bribery but how cheap these guys are.
And some of them may "hang" like a cheap suit!
Lukery made the same observation when looking at the bribes paid in the Sibel Edmonds case - $5000 would buy you a Congress Critter.
Amazing! You would think "souls" might fetch a bit more ...with inflation and all. To paraphrase Wilde --being a crook is one thing, but a being a cheap one is absolutely unforgivable!
Some days, it looks like the ground is crumbling out from under George's cloven hooves.
To toot my own horn, I stole one of Bushie's Medals of Valor and gave it to John Koppel, for pledging his life, his fortune and and his sacred honor, and acknowledged in print that he was now fair game for Rove's dirty tricks.
See "Shut up, Tina!", on Once Upon a Pint @
http://proud2blibrul.wordpress.com/
Let us all hang together!
"I've often wondered how big corporations could make a credible moral distinction between paying off the mob and paying off the GOP, a Bush, a Harding, a DeLay!"
They feel no need to make such a distinction. Their overall goal, as I have said before, is not only criminal but treasonous - to establish a new form of corporate feudalism as the overriding principal not only in the US, but globally.
Fuzzflash, you really shouldn't flash Joel Bakan's name around without providing some links. To order The Corporation, IMO the most important documentary you could ever watch, Purchase The Corporation DVD. If you are content to stream the video in a small window, The Corporation Streaming Video.
As per usual, I have some appropriate quotes to add to the discussion.
"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business." -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And on the subject of corrupt politicians,
"An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought."
-- Simon Cameron (1799 - 1889)
In answer to Naomi,
"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." -- Benjamin Franklin
And my latest is a meta,
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." -- Somerset Maugham
Right you are, Sad, I'll have to lift my game. Need to upskill my cyber smarts and get with the program.
From a former "missspent" youth as free-range beaver fancier, libertine and more or less, Pavlovianly conditioned anarchist, perhaps you'll appreciate my motto from those glorious years of profligacy and wanton abandon:
"Kent Scott me where I am today."
(works best wuth a New Zealand eccent).
However, domestic realpolitik and the brutal fate suffered by John Wayne Bobbit have given pause to this former rake's progress. I have embraced the wisdom of the Project for a New American Monogamy, and no longer dream of becoming a roue.
Arrivederci Casanova, hola Casamore.
By all means, feel free to quote me :)
Sadbuttrue, of course I knew the quote - most of us "libruls' know it and respect it, unlike conservatives who might know it but fail to appreciate its provenance.
I was being casual, is all...
Generally-speaking, I'm verbose in the extreme - tiresomely, at times. I suffer from an inability to be brief.
But I am working on it.
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